Hunting for treasure in thrift stores is a favorite pastime for many. When a good deal is discovered, it can feel like an epic win for the ages. A bargain hunter visiting an estate sale was hoping to snag a cool item and ended up walking away with a 700-year-old treasure.
Will Sideri stumbled across a framed document of elaborate script in Latin, along with some musical notes, that was hanging on a wall at an estate sale in Maine. A sticker noted that it was 1285 AD and based on what he’d seen in a manuscripts class at Colby College, the document looked pretty legit.
For a steal, Sideri secured the artwork for $75. He then got some people to correctly identify the age of the document. Academics confirmed the parchment was from The Beauvais Missal, used in the Beauvais Cathedral in France and dated to the late 13th century.
The group said it was used about 700 years ago in Roman Catholic worship as part of a prayer book and priests’ liturgy. The full missal was once owned by William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper publisher, before being sold in 1942. It was then divvied up into individual pages, which was common practice in the early 20th century. “Thousands of unique manuscripts were destroyed and scattered this way,” Lisa Fagin Davis, the executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, said.
Davis has been able to track down more than 100 individual pages from The Beauvais Missal from across the country. Altogether, the book should have 309 pages in its original form. The page Sideri purchased has caught the eye of many scholars.
It’s estimated that the document could be worth as much as $10,000 but Sideri has no intention of selling it. Instead, he plans on keeping it because he likes the history of the document and didn’t purchase the document just to sell it.
Source: https://twitter.com/lisafdavis/status/1566210811072286720